Logic and language

Including the nature of meaning and propositions, formal semantics, metasemantics, pragmatics, syntax, semantic paradoxes, theories of truth, and the foundations of mathematics

The logic and language group brings together researchers working in these core areas of philosophy. Specific interests include Godel's results, theories of truth deflationism, semantic paradoxes, the applicability of mathematics, theoretical syntax, pragmatics, proof theory, and non-classical logic.

Research questions

Research questions our group is currently working on include:

What is the nature of propositions? Are these structured entities or rather sets of worlds?
What is the meaning of referential terms such as names, descriptions, indexicals, and demonstratives?
What is the relation between semantic values and various types of content?
What is the meaning of epistemic and deontic modal expressions?
Is there a common meaning to the many uses of 'if' clauses, and if so, what is it?
How should we construe possible worlds for the purpose of possible worlds semantics?
What are we trying to model when we assign meanings to expressions: Processes in the brain? Social conventions? Speaker intuitions? Something else?

People

Core faculty working on logic and language include:

Image	Research interests
Mahrad Almotahari	Dr Almotahari has written about a variety of topics in the philosopy of language, the philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. His current work is largely about identity, Frege's Puzzle, and truth.
Matthew Chrisman	Metaethics, philosophy of language, epistemology, political philosophy.
Wolfgang Schwarz	Formal epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language, logic

Other staff and post-docs with an interest in logic and language include:

Image	Research interests
Guy Fletcher	Metaethics, ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of language.
Inna Kupreeva	Ancient philosophy and science, ancient and mediaeval logic.
Aidan McGlynn	Epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, feminism.
Mike Ridge	Ethics, political philosophy, action theory, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language.
Nick Treanor	Metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind and language.
Ronnie Cann (Linguistics)	Theoretical linguistics especially dependency theory and word grammar, English syntax, lexical semantics, syntactic change
Caroline Heycock (Linguistics)	Syntactic theory, syntactic variation and change, Germanic, Japanese.
Alex Lascarides (Informatics)	Theoretical and computational linguistics, semantics, pragmatics, logic and knowledge representation.
Paul Schweizer (Informatics)	Philosophical logic, the computational paradigm, conceptual foundations of cognitive science and artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind and language.
Mark Steedman (Informatics)	Computational linguistics; spoken intonation; spoken language processing

Postgraduate study

Meetings and events

You may be interested in the Language at Edinburgh lunches: regular poster sessions on language-related topics from PPLS and Informatics. There is also a wide range of linguistics reading groups and seminars.

This article was published on 2024-10-14